Adieu, vile charsets!

Beamreactor drops the support for alternative encodings

Everyday, the support of alternative text encodings, such as EUC-JP (a two to three bytes EUC code meant to display Japanese characters) becomes less crucial, thanks to the efforts provided by the Unicode Consortium to refine their Unicode standard, that withstands most if not all the available characters on earth, including hieroglyphs.

The vast adoption of the UTF-8 text encoding format by most of the software companies worldwide made the need for alternative encodings less vital, and as such we plan to drop its support in the future Beamreactor releases.

Whilst we provide partial support for the UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings, endianess and Byte Order Mark issues tied to those encodings, as well as the lack of support for the ASCII characters, makes Beamreactor maintain UTF8 as its encoding of predilection.